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The Mission Ends
I would not stay around to see the mission end. Once the instrument was airborne, there was no further purpose for our lab in the airplane hangar, and my job title became moving man and trucker. The packing went ok, but on the way home I ran into another weather condition: severe thunderstorms. Driving the broad-sided truck east on Highway 12, it was a challenge to keep it in my lane. The rain slowed me down but fortunately, the wind was not enough to blow me over. I thought about how fickle the spring weather in the Midwest could be. After weeks of steady wind, the short window of calm that permitted a balloon launch was followed by a gale force blast, perhaps to compensate and bring the average wind speed back up to the South Dakota standard.
Continue readingOur next opportunity finally arrived two weeks later. Having been through two “dress rehearsals,” we knew what to expect.
The procedure was to lay out the balloon on a protective tarp on the runway. The topmost section of the balloon, a small portion that would become the “bubble”, was fed through a retaining “spool” and folded back on itself. The top section had two tubes, made of balloon material, through which helium would be fed, inflating the bubble, which would gradually ease up from the tarp, eventually becoming large enough to lift itself off the ground entirely, with only the spool and the tension from the uninflated remainder keeping it in place.
Continue readingOff Duty
While the wind blew, the various research groups and the launch crew prepared and tested their experiments and rigs, like fishermen mending nets to get ready for the next big catch. At the end of each day we would check the wind conditions and then give up for the day, leaving the airport to seek dinner and retire to our rooms at the Super-8 for a few hours of personal time and sleep before repeating the routine the next day.
Continue readingInstrument Troubleshooting
Cosmic ray instruments are complex and it seems there is always something that needs adjusting or fixing or calibrating, and then testing and confirming and re-calibrating. This is what consumed our time while waiting for the wind to die down. And it is a good thing to have had that time to do those last ground tests, because we encountered a troubling condition—an intermittent false trigger.
Continue readingSetting up Shop
Scientific balloon launches have been part of NASA’s mission for over 30 years, but in 1977, they were conducted by NCAR– the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR maintained a balloon launching facility in Texas that had all of the equipment and resources to support experiments like ours. Unfortunately, Texas was too far south for our experiment. Instead, we would be operating from makeshift facilities in Aberdeen, a town of 25,000 in an area of South Dakota that offered low population, but enough infrastructure to meet our technical and launch requirements.
There was a regional airport outside of town, and an airplane hangar was provided to house our laboratory field station. We were not the only researchers, however. Groups from other universities were also trying to measure the properties of cosmic rays. We each had a section of the hangar to set up and prepare our experiments for launch. After packing up our instrument and all the essential support equipment from our 4th-floor lab in the Physics building into a rental truck and driving a day west on Highway 12, we arrived in Aberdeen. It took us several more days to recreate an operational cosmic ray field lab in the airplane hangar.
Continue readingThis is the beginning of a series of posts that describe the launching of a scientific balloon experiment in 1977. The story was reconstructed after encountering some old photos from that event. Reminiscences can run rather long, so I have partitioned it into more manageable segments. I hope you enjoy this snapshot of the scientific and cultural times of the 1970s.
Background
While attending the University of Minnesota, one of my part-time jobs was as a lab assistant in the Physics and Astronomy Department. I worked in a laboratory dedicated to the cosmic ray research group led by professors Phyllis Freier and C J (Jake) Waddington. In the group were lab manager Chuck Gilman and graduate student Bob Scarlett who were preparing an instrument to be launched and held aloft by a balloon to gather data about cosmic rays, a (still) mysterious radiation of high energy particles from deep outer space.
Continue readingI always had a mild interest in astronomy, and it became a strong interest in the 1990s, triggered by a homework assignment given to my ten-year-old son to go out at night and identify some constellations. I took him away from the city lights to a park where we could see the stars emerge from twilight. On that beautiful fall evening, we found the constellations he was looking for, and we also saw Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky. Through binoculars, we were surprised that we could see its moons. This caused me to wonder what else I might be able to see if I were to look a little closer.
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I started this blog when I retired in 2019, just before COVID. It was an activity that occupied me during those months of quarantine and allowed me to share my interests and projects. I was, and still am, ignorant of blogging technology. Yes, I have, in my career, written code for the world of web pages and browser-based applications, but every time I did so, I wondered, “How could this ever work?” It struck me as a house of cards, with fragile links and unreliable and inconsistent page renderings.
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Hard to believe. A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone. He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations. He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects. If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill. Which he then solved.
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When I was studying physics in college, one of the early subjects was Einstein’s special relativity theory. The subject is called “relativity” because it explains the physics of objects moving relative to each other. It is “special” because it only applies to uniform relative motion, not motion induced by gravity, which is covered by “general” relativity, which Einstein described a decade later.
Special relativity replaced Galileo’s and Isaac Newton’s earlier theories, which were superb at explaining falling objects and orbiting planets, but had run into trouble explaining the properties of fast-moving electrons and light.
It is an early subject in the physics curriculum because as students, we were just learning the techniques of calculus and linear algebra; techniques that are helpful, but not required to understand special relativity. Most people are familiar with special relativity, and even if they don’t understand the details, they have heard “E=mc2”, one of the consequences of it. They may also have heard about time dilation, the effect of a moving clock slowing down relative to a stationary one.
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